Once you have been playing piano for a while, it will eventually take new strategies to continue your improvement. Especially once you may be in music school, it is going to take a lot of thinking to figure out how to manage all of the responsibilities and music that you have to learn. Let me share with you something that was a game-changer for me in music school that I frankly wish I had discovered way sooner.
It started because I had an almost overwhelming amount of music to learn and prepare in a relatively short window of time. I was working on the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata, the Beethoven F major Cello Sonata, the Debussy Cello Sonata, the Ravel G major Piano Concerto, Stravinsky's Trois Mouvements de Petrouchka, Beethoven Op. 110, Bach G major Partita, two Rachmaninoff Etudes Tableaux, a Ligeti etude (Fanfares), a Chopin etude (Winter Wind), the Nutcracker Concert Suite arranged by Mikhail Pletnev, and Brahms Eight Pieces Op. 76, and each of these pieces were going to be performed over a period of about a month and a half. I had about five months beforehand to prepare all of them, and many of them were brand new.
Needless to say I was quite overwhelmed to have five months to prepare so many different pieces. I knew that I needed a strategy to get a handle on this project. So I decided that while I worked on figuring out what my strategy was, I was going to keep a practicing journal. I needed to know what I was spending my time on in order to make sure that all of these pieces got the attention that they needed. So I wrote down what piece I played, for how long, what I did, what practicing techniques I used, what errors there were, and when I took breaks. At the beginning of each practice session, I would spend some time looking over the previous entries and seeing if I could notice any patterns.
The whole experience was a revelation to me because it totally changed how I perceived my practicing. Suddenly I made connections between what I had done on previous days and what I was seeing later on. I saw what worked and what didn't work. I understood what effect each technique I used had on my playing. It brought a level of big-picture clarity to my practicing strategy that I had never had before without using a practicing journal.
I am proof that it is never too late to start using a practicing journal. I had gone through years and years of recitals and performances and never really used one. But when things got too crazy, I started using one and it made everything not necessarily easy but at least somewhat under control. I can genuinely say that I am extremely proud of each of the performances I did during that time both for the quantity of difficult repertoire that I managed and also for the quality of the performances.